Theos-Talk Archives (August 1998 Message tt00071)

Hi everybody

This is a reply to John Vorstermans of the New Zealand theos-nz discussion
list but I thought it might be worth posting here too.

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The phrase "cause and effect" has become a little like a tight garment that
a child has outgrown.

It is a convenient way of thinking, of course, but does rather force things
into a single artificial role (ie as a cause or an effect) and separate
them from each other in our minds.

Reality is more like a continuous sequence of states unfolding one into
another through processes, rather like the pattern of currents in a large
river, only vastly more complex. The river is the consciousness-substance
action-experience stuff or space, subtle and physical, that we find
ourselves in all the time. We modify it all the time as we live, choose and
act on all the levels of our being. We experience it all the time as our
relationship with all around us and also as our interior makeup. That last
one is sometimes the hardest to take...

Karma, as a word, is sometimes used for the principle of law-like
connectedness in this great river of life, and sometimes for the current
itself. These are aspects of the idea of "action" which the word originally
and simply meant. People frequently use it just for the causal aspect of
the flow of reality.

One of the key questions about karma is just how predictable an outcome is,
and I think this is crucial to John's message. The first point is that, as
in a current, the direction of flow is easy to predict over short distances
but harder at greater distances because of the way currents diffuse and
other currents come in to bear on them. It is more complicated than that,
however, because of the acausal principle which has been discovered in
recent work in chaos theory on large complex systems, and because of the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle in the quantum theory of things at the
atomic and sub-atomic scale.

These basically mean that even if you know the exact state of a "cause",
the exact nature of its "effect" is not accurately predictable, in ways
appropriate to the scale of size, period of time etc. And that's just in
the physical world. Bring in the superphysical worlds with their intimate
relationship between consciousness and substance, and the whole situation
becomes vastly more complex still.

The result is that there is no such thing as pure unalloyed determinism. No
karma is utterly unchangeable. It can always be modified, if only a little.

Without going into chaos theory in detail (which I don't exactly have a PhD
in anyway), when you have a very complex system such as the global weather,
a very slight input or change at one point can lead to a radically
different change of the state of the system, out of all proportion to the
input, when the system is in a state of relative instability, ie a
condition where it can very easily go one way or the other. A thin book
standing on its edge is readily pushed over one way or the other. One way
could be just onto the table top, the other could be over the edge onto the
cat's saucer of milk. That will probably start another thread of discussion.

I think the karmic field is similar; some outcomes are strongly determined
by something in the past which has set up a major current with a lot of
momentum, while others unfold into a big result from a tiny input. So you
could have a similar "accident" happen to two diffent people and one could
be the almost inevitable result of a distant major "cause" while the other
could be the result of some trivial, local cause.

This is one reason to be careful what we say to people with an illness,
say. Sometimes well-meaning people will say "Oh, you must have done
something terrible in the past to have this problem now." But what cruelty
it can be, to say this! And so downright ill-informed. There's a more
fundamental reason to be careful with what we say about karma, too; we just
plain don't know most of what's going on. You know the saying that one has
to be of the status of an adept before one can understand karma fully.

As to how superphysical currents precipitate out into physical events -
well, that's too hard! Maybe, however, chaos theory and quantum theory
between them give us some chinks in the apparent armour of the physical
world for change to "miraculously" appear. Jung's synchronicity is relevant
too, though my feeling is that it describes rather than explains. And maybe
you've only got to move space for physical substance to follow it ....
Material for several discussion threads there.

So I hope this sheds light on your question, John. I could blather on at
greater length, but this isn't exactly a theosophical lecture :-)

Murray


At 10:10 AM 7/08/98 +1200, John Vorstermans wrote:
>Hi Everyone.
>
>During our studies in Wellington of Patanjalis Yoga Sutras we have been
>looking at "Karma" and "Cause and Effect" with some detail.   In our
>studies we have used 4 different translations of the Yoga Sutras to give us
>a good cross-reference and hopefully a fuller understanding of the Sutras
>(or seed thoughts).  The Yoga Sutras being a practical exposition of yoga
>which most modern schools of Yoga have developed from today.
>
>Over the last few weeks Karma has been one of the topics of discussion
>along with "Cause and Effect".  There seems to be some difference between
>to two, Karma being generally a result of the Samaskaras or latent
>impressions stored in our Ego (causal body) from past lives, these
>impressions coming together to form a vehicle for future lives so that they
>may be worked through what we know as karma.
>
>However "Cause and Effect" or so it seems is different.  There appears to
>be causes that happen in a current life as well as their effect that is not
>Karma.  It might be likened to perhaps to a child putting a hand in a fire
>with the effect of pain and burnt skin.
>
>Of course both Karma and "Cause and Effect" ultimately are to give us
>experience.
>
>Has anyone any thoughts or understanding on the difference between the two?